Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday September 17, 2012 @12:53AM
from the on-second-thought dept.

MarkWhittington writes "A recent story in The Atlantic reminds us that the Apollo program, so fondly remembered in the 21st Century, was opposed by a great many people while it was ongoing, on the theory that the money spent going to the moon would have been better spent on poverty programs. The problem with this view was that spending for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society dwarfed the Apollo program, that the programs in the Great Society largely failed to address poverty and other social ills, and that the Apollo program actually had a stimulative effect on the economy that fostered economic growth and created jobs by driving the development of technology,"

Actually, the article doesn't provide the context you're hoping for. If anything, it makes two points: that the Apollo mission was a political success and that the arguments of its critics -- a majority of the scientists at NASA, it would seem -- have been forgotten. There is nothing in the article that would give substance to the claim that the Apollo program had an economic effect that exceeded its costs.

It is an old dilemma... do philosopher kings use the carrot, the stick, or some combination incentive. Very often possibility is better expressed as probability. Put another way, how well is a destination communicated to a mob, how well is a mob moved to action, and the persistence (and consistency) with which the mob continues to be shepherded.

This when said mob consists of a minimum N+1 political fractures (population samples) with a minimum N^N^X+1 combinations of orthogonal, parallel, and skewed agenda

If we spent only 10% of the Military budget on NASA, we would see most of science fiction become a reality within only 2 generations (If physics plays nicely)Instead we dont even spend the amount of money used by the military to air condition tents on NASA. We value killing people far more than advancing technology.

It will never be economical to send people into space until we start doing it regularly. The only way to make something like that economical is to keep on fixing and fiddling things to make them cheaper. And that won't happen if you don't have anything to fix and fiddle.

The 'eggs in one basket' problem is the biggest reason I want us to get off the planet sooner rather than later.

It will never be economical to send people into space until we start doing it regularly.

Wrong. Satellites are launched frequently and it's far from cheap (it's cheap compared to launching fragile humans, though). Rockets are expensive. There's no way around it until we find a more efficient way to send things into space than blowing up tons of very expensive fuel every launch.

Cheap is not the issue. each satellite launch can cost $90 bajillion dollars, but if it will turn a handsome profit, they will be launched. You think that DISH and SIRIUS/XM put their birds up there because they were told how cheap it was?

They may not be cheap, but they are cheap enough to be economical. Private companies launch satellites regularly. On the other hand, there were only 7 people privately in space.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#List_of_flown_space_tourists) says that mark Shuttleworth was one of them, I didn't know that. Apparently he had to fly in a Soyus, he wasn't Shuttle-worthy.

There were private efforts to buy a Shuttle, including several investors that wanted to simply be permitted to have Rockwell International (the company who built the Space Shuttle) to simply keep the production line going to make a couple Space Shuttles for private industry.

NASA wouldn't even let it happen. They controlled the design and it couldn't be used for anything but government work.

That those investors were lucky because it ended up costing way more to actually fly the Shuttle than NASA was originally advertising, the fact that private efforts to get into space had been happening at all should have been a sign that there were better ways to get things like that done.

There were a few astronauts who flew on the Space Shuttle that could be seen as from outside of the traditional NASA astronaut corps recruitment process. At least one Saudi prince and an Israeli engineer flew on the Space Shuttle, as well as a few NASA contractors has some of their personnel go up too. Serious proposals to send private citizens on their own dime were proposed, but didn't happen and in particular after the loss of the Challenger all such proposals were openly dismissed.

It really should be seen as a sad statement of the state of American spaceflight where the first private commercial spaceflight crews were launched with equipment designed by a Communist country.

Satellite launches are cheap, compared to how much they cost 20+ years ago. They may not be cheap enough for the average Slashdotter to launch his own satellite, but they're cheaper than they've ever been.

Actually, 20 years ago lots of satelites were launched by private citizens without any great financial expense. There are loads of satelites up there that were designed, built and launch by ham radio clubs for example.

The trick was - they didn't use their own trips. NASA being public meant they were quite open to ways of helping ordinary taxpaying citizens get some benefit from space expenses and most of those satelites would hitch a ride on other planned launches. Since you're flying up anyway, and a small hammy satellite weighs almost nothing it didn't add any real cost to take it up along and put it in orbit while you're up there anyway, so they did it.Generally it wasn't added on to commercial launches as that would amount to making the customer pay for the (tiny) extra cost - but academic launches (like weather satellites) were fair game.

Of course Ham radio has all but gone the way of the dodo in the past 2 decades so I honestly don't know if this is still common practise today.

> if the children's inheritance is going to be a dying cesspool of a planet?

Endless whingeing by environmentalists aside, the planet is in WAY better shape today than it was circa, say, 1960. At least, in the US and Europe. You might have read somewhere about orange rivers in the US that used to catch on fire & burn, acrid air pollution throughout the northeastern US, factories that used to belch smoke into the air, etc. And the 1960s were a net IMPROVEMENT compared to, say, London or New York circa

In 50 years your kids will be a lot better off than you are and will have learned from your hand wringing and sobbing that following your life style leads nowhere. So they will rebel against your whining ways and go out and build something.

Unless you convince them of your despair and they decide your koolaid is the best way out of this world.

That is hardly axiomatic. Were the Jewish kids born in Germany in the 1930's better off in their teens than their Grandparents who lived there in the 1890s ?

Were the Afrikaans children in the concentration camps in 1902 better off than their grandparents who worried about the power of the British empire and moved away from it in 1838 ?

There are both good and bad times in history. Nobody has absolute control over what comes, but we definitely DO have an influence on the future. We can help make it better or help make it worse. We can play a role toward a future that is an improvement over our lives, or one where the freedoms and technology we have has been lost.

Every society comes to an end. Every empire falls. The great western empire is showing many of the signs that other great empires showed in their final days. It could be that the end of our civilization is close by.If it is, would you prefer it be replaced by a better or a worse one ? History is full of either.

You touch on why I am so unhappy with the Republican party. Obama isn't a great choice, but the only alternative with a chance at being elected is far worse because they've gone crazy. The last time I seriously considered voting Republican was in 2000, when I was asking myself if it mattered that W. was dumb, because he had wisely surrounded himself with what seemed an excellent team. Republicans think they're so manly, but they run and hide from any problem that can't be solved by force and hammers. T

Only Madoff's scheme was egregious enough to land him in jail.BR
As far as I can tell, Madoff only went to jail because he ripped off rich people. If it had been retirement funds or a widows and orphans charity he'd probably be out on the street today.

That doesn't seem quite right. Like if I jump up and down enough, regularly, while flapping my arms, eventually things will work out and I'll fly? No, there are things missing there that time and repetition won't solve.

How many people would need to be living on Mars in order for human race to continue to survive after an extinction level event on Earth?

No, because there are other things blocking your body from flying. But if you get thrown in water and flap your arms around in different ways, each time seeing what worked and adding more of that - eventually you might become a pretty good swimmer.

The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that the human population was reduced to 15,000, however, a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution (15 Sep 99) intimates that the human population may have dropped to as low as 2,000 prior to the Late Stone Age.

I've seen numbers for a viable gene pool for humans that range from 80/80 distinct, unrelated males/females to 660 with a ratio of 1 male to every 2 females. Biologists I've spoken to seem to agree that the 80/80 mix that seems to be popular on the net is simply non-viable in except perhaps in a laboratory with eugenic sanctions and cleansing of (suggestive) non-viable breeding stock which is a nasty moral/ethical rabbit hole this thread doesn't need to pursue.

Regardless, cultural norms (and quasi-taboos) that we broadly hold today would be challenged. Sustaining a village of 300-800 mixed age individuals in frontier conditions is vastly different than growing an outpost for a couple dozen adult professional pioneers from a modular deployment.

Fundamental values... the essence of law itself would be unlike anything we know in civil society today.

Regardless, cultural norms (and quasi-taboos) that we broadly hold today would be challenged. Sustaining a village of 300-800 mixed age individuals in frontier conditions is vastly different than growing an outpost for a couple dozen adult professional pioneers from a modular deployment.

Fundamental values... the essence of law itself would be unlike anything we know in civil society today.

I'd have to say that this part of your otherwise excellent post is nonsense. We already have groups (for example, some Inuit villages in northern reaches of North America) that live under such conditions. They may be moderate outliers in terms of culture, but they're still part of civil society.

Tight inbreeding without health care actually eliminates congenital birth defects. By the third generation, some 9/32 of that generation survive, with 3/32 being carriers of defects and 6/32 being non-carriers. Tight inbreeding is very, VERY unfriendly to carriers of congenital defects, and in a few short generations MOST of their offspring come out defective (and die) and the remainder are largely non-carriers and so can safely inbreed without any further defects.

> Surviving on a planet without its own ecosystem, where the only way to stay alive over the long term is to maintain a high-technology industrial base is quite another.

People forget that the indigenous American tribes whose ancestors first colonized the western hemisphere *had* technology compared to, say, the first Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalis, and Homo Sapiens taking their first steps around the old world. How long do you think *anyone* --third-century Inuit or not -- would have survived in northe

The 'eggs in one basket' problem is the biggest reason I want us to get off the planet sooner rather than later.

The problem is, with current and foreseeable technology, going into space is like moving out of your parent's basement into a tent in their backyard. You're still reliant on the house for vital services (kitchen, bathroom, water, electricity) and the structure you've moved into is more vulnerable (structurally weaker) and less habitable (less insulation) than the one you've left. You can claim your independence because you're "no longer living in your parent's basement", but it's a hollow boast - because any disaster that engulfs the house is going to swallow your tent as well.

Now there's some thinking that will really piss off people in a few billion years should you continue down the path of isolation.

If manned space travel isn't feasible in a few hundred years, then we're doing something badly wrong. The problem is that it, like many other things, has a number of technical prerequisites. A lot of them are in materials science, where research is very expensive and the space program doesn't have enough funding (even if it spent all of its money) to meaningfully influence the speed of development. Apollo needed high-termperature ceramics and it needed computers. Regular, cheap, travel from the Earth to orbit requires a space elevator which requires (among other things) something with the tensile strength on the order of carbon nanotubes (but which can be mass produced) and either 80+% efficient photovoltaic cells or cheap superconductors. These are both likely to appear independent of a space program well within the next 50 years. A space elevator will probably take 10 years to construct and be phenomenally expensive (it will make the Channel Tunnel seem cheap) but has a potentially huge return on investment.

Look at sea and air travel. Current ships and planes are vastly more efficient and safe than early endeavours and a lot of the technology that made this possible was originally created for other uses. To put the cost of manned space travel into perspective, a single shuttle launch cost enough to completely fund about 1,500 PhDs to completion, or to fund about 200 DARPA advanced research projects. And that's just to get the ship into orbit, not counting the costs of the equipment for the mission, the training, the ground personnel, and so on.

A man on the surface of mars could do more in a single day than all the probes have done to date.

At a vastly higher cost. The current rovers mass far less than a man, but on a trip to Mars, the cost of radiation shielding, water recycling and food would dwarf the mass of the man. Plus, of course, all of the propellant required to move all of this into orbit and then to Mars. And the larger landing craft required. The cost of sending a man on a one-way trip to Mars with a year of supplies would be well over a thousand times the cost of sending a rover.

Tell me more... While interesting factoids, do you think you might be off by an order of magnitude there, or maybe two? I'm just objecting to arbitrary numbers being thrown around

A shuttle launch costs $500M. That's the public number published by NASA. The total cost of a PhD is around $200K. My PhD was on a grant for a total of £500K, including funding three PhD students, two postdocs, and part of six lecturers for three years. The overheads for a postdoc are about the same as for a PhD student, so if we assume that none of the money went to lecturers' salaries and costs (which is not true) and that PhD students and postdocs cost the same amount (postdocs get a higher sa

The problem is not one of feeding the poor -> there is, from a strictly quantity perspective, more than enough food to feed everyone (in the US), for a little while, at least; the problem comes when the next planting season rolls around, and some farmers decide that it's easier to claim you are poor (and receive free food), than to work the fields; when enough farmers do this, a deficit of food appears, which is colloquially called a famine. Due to the way a famine operates, I imagine that once you have

There is more than enough food on the Earth to feed everybody with plenty to spare. If you took all of humanity and put them into an area roughly the size of Texas, you could not only house everybody and be able to provide for factories and such, but you could even have space for farms and almost everything else that we need as people. That could even leave the rest of the Earth available as a wilderness area.

I'm not saying I would enjoy living in such high density housing, but it is possible.

Even today, the largest impediments to getting food to people involve a combination of logistics and politics getting in the way that prevents the food getting to those people who need it the most. It has almost nothing to do with the capacity of the Earth being able to feed that many people. It isn't even an issue with money as there are plenty of "relief agencies" and people who have excess money and resources willing to send food to those who are less fortunate.

It is a problem when you have tyrants as the head of countries who deliberately wish to starve portions of their country for political purposes... usually because they have withheld their support for that tyrant and reject the soul crushing lack of freedom that comes from such leaders. Define tyranny how ever you want, but you can't feed yourself if you are a slave that isn't permitted to eat and kept from doing that at the point of a gun.

Imagine how many more benefits could the US have received if that kind of money was not used up for a stupid political competition.

Look at it this way ---- The US would have received a total of nada, zilch, zero, if the money that was spent on the Apollo program (or any other space program, manned or unmanned) was spent on welfare checks

The one spinoff that you guys have failed to take account of --- the brand value of the "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"

It is precisely because of Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon, it is precisely because of the WHOLE WORLD get to witness that particular landing, and it is precisely because of the combined AWESTRUCK of the human population from the entire planet, watching the black and white image of a guy in a very fat suit, bouncing up and down on a rocky / sandy surface, that the BRAND VALUE of the United States of America shot up !

The effect is tremendous.

Ever since the moon landing (back in the 60's) millions of very bright people emigrated from their homeland to America.

It is precisely because of those bright minded people that America leads the world in term of technology, economy and might.

America gets to be so strong not because of Americans alone.

Without new ideas from those who moved into America, based on their perception that America being the BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, America wouldn't be able to churn out so many wonderful inventions, from electronics to bio-tech to many other fields, and it is precisely those inventions and the value of those IPs (intellectual properties) that have propped up the living standard of America.

Ridiculous. People did not emigrate to the US because of the brand value of the Apollo program. People emigrated to the US because the US was a rich country, which could pay much more than any other place in the world post WWII -- a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.

a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.

If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers.

And FDR died in 1944 a year before the end of the war. So he can't take credit for leading the country out of the Second World War, especially since he'd have likely have put back into place the failed policies that caused so much trouble leading up to the Second World War.

And what was so special about the moon to create that brand value? As compared to:

first man made object in orbitfirst animal in orbitfirst man in spacefirst woman in space first

and I'm going to copy&paste the rest from wikipedia as I'm too lazy to type:

The first man-made object to escape Earth's gravity and pass near the Moon was Luna 1; the first man-made object to impact the lunar surface was Luna 2, and the first photographs of the normally occluded far side of the Moon were made by Luna 3, all in 1959. The first spacecraft to perform a successful lunar soft landing was Luna 9 and the first unmanned vehicle to orbit the Moon was Luna 10, both in 1966.[43] Rock and soil samples were brought back to Earth by three Luna sample return missions.

Getting a man on the moon was the only "first" the US ever scored in the space race. (What's even wors as mpst milestone swere pretty much arbitrary)

I agree, the manned spaceflight were nothing more than the response to the Cold War running wild. It was all about the national chauvinism and proving you can get there before the adversary. It wasn't about the economy, neither about innovation, etc. All these were necessary things, but were never ever the goal.

I do not believe the money would have been better spent on poverty, I believe it could have been better spent for scientific advancement in other fields. As manned spaceflight today do not have all the virtues ones would like to attribute to them. Probes, robots, rovers, satellites are doing better cheaper. The cost to send a single man into space could be better spend on direct scientific research. But I guess the taxpayer doesn't buy this. It's manned spaceflights or don't pick a penny from my pocket.

The reality is the government isn't able to sell science to taxpayers because it isn't convince itself, on another hand increasing national chauvinism has a direct return for the governing party.

So there just wasn't any other way to get this stimulative effect besides the Apollo program?

Spending is spending.

If you can find work for people to do, and then pay them for honestly doing it, and that work can in some way have some sort of positive benefit it will be better than just giving people things and hoping they stop being poor.

Now that means you have to recognize education as a form of productive work, it means you have to be willing to capitalize on under utilized labour, it means you have to have valid benchmarks for achievement. Hiring 1000 random people off the street and asking them to be teachers in classrooms with 100 students each might but 100 000 kids in school but it's unlikely to give them a useful education. It means when you have an under utilized labour market you have to be willing to tax or borrow the money to get something out of that labour and so on.

Governments are largely giant insurance systems - that's good, healthcare, police, army etc. are all basically forms of insurance. But they are also able to create markets for products and drive investment and innovation, that's good too (and in fact is in many cases a part of their spending as an insurance system, think police cars and fire trucks - innovation and demand for a new product to serve a useful roll, also, they aren't reinventing the wheel when they don't have to). Governments, as giant insurance systems, are actually a good place for risk. If any random company lost 40 billion dollars tomorrow (including Apple or Exxon) it would be a disaster for that company, big enough companies can survive of course, but a lot of investors would lose a lot of money and so on. Just about all of the western governments, including greece, could lose 40 billion dollars tomorrow and it would be inconvenient but not catastrophic (well, except that greece is trapped in the Euro but lets not get into that, they could survive an added 40 billion in debt, they'd just be stuck with 8-12% interest on it). It's also very hard for a government to actually lose 40 billion dollars in a rich country, it can very inefficiently use 40 billion dollars, but 40 billion dollars trying to build a tunnel to china and failing would still have put people to work for 40 billion dollars and driven up consumer demand for all the stuff they bought, so the government would have spent 40 billion, taxed back 15 or 20 billion, and benefited some from the spillover effect. And be left with a hole in the ground that goes no where. If the apollo programme had been a complete failure (all the rockets blew up for example), or if it turned out that for whatever reason you could never actually get any equipment that would be functional on the moon (people or otherwise) then at least all the people put to work trying would have had jobs, no small subset of the population would have borne the burden of eating the lost investment.

There are more complicated layers of course, about what to do in various states of employment, when just giving stuff away is the right course of action (emergencies for example), there's spending money to prevent disasters rather than recovering from them, which then looks like you've wasted money on a problem that never materialized. And sometimes you are only putting enough money into a problem to prevent it from getting worse.

You seem to forget that in the 1960's, the technology to build robots like Curiosity didn't exist yet. And we do hear the same complaints about the Mars rovers (it costs too much, etc) these days as well.

Manned spaceflight as a whole seems like a bust too me. Way too expensive for far too little gain.

Do you know how big or little the gain from the space program was?
Things from NASA: LEDs, better prosthetics, scratch resistan lenses, anti icing systems for aircraft, better tires, fire resistant stuff, temper foam found in tempurpedic beds, freeze drying food, water purification, among other things. Could we have got the same gains for less money? Perhaps, it is difficult to say. But the space race wasn't just about getting to the moon.

So there just wasn't any other way to get this stimulative effect besides the Apollo program? Manned spaceflight as a whole seems like a bust too me. Way too expensive for far too little gain. Probes (and robots) have done so much more and cost so much less. Someday maybe it will be more economical to send a man to Mars. Until then, why the rush?

I wish that Carl Sagan had not stuck his head out and spread this blatant lie.

Remote probes and robots do have a role to play in the exploration of space, particularly because they are cheaper and can go to places that are hard or even impossible for people to be at. Don't mistake the rest of what I say as dismissing robotic exploration, as I think it is a good thing. The problem is with having robots be the only way to get stuff done in space and it sort of misses the whole point of why it is being done.

The point of a probe is to do the initial reconnaissance and to do general surveys. I should point out that is also being done here on the Earth. There reaches a point where the probes no longer really get the job done and the initial reconnaissance is done. I would even go out on a limb and say that the Curiosity rover is about as good as it gets with current technology. The next step to go further is to send people to Mars to at the very least control the robots from orbit around Mars or perhaps to even land on Mars and leverage their efforts by controlling the robots locally.

It also helps to have somebody on site to be able to do things like repair a wheel or to simply push a little bit when things get stuck.

None of this even begins to touch what impact having people living on other worlds can have for the range of human experience that will help enable new thoughts and thought processes that can in turn be used to reflect upon other problems that humanity is facing. Very frequently knowledge gained in one field of endeavor can be applied in a completely different field and be used to solve problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable.

To suggest that we may need to do more robotic missions or to be more intelligent about how those robotic missions are being performed, I'd have to agree. To suggest that the manned spaceflight program as a whole needs to be nuked and all of the "money" being dumped on that manned spaceflight effort should be redirected to robotic missions.... please don't get started. You are living in a fantasy land if you think that is going to happen in more ways I can count.

That makes as much sense as oceanographers who think that eliminating NASA is going to somehow increase their ocean research budgets. I've even heard that argument expressed before by oceanographers.

The space programs were still a way to distract attention from poverty in both the USA and USSR.

If we throw more money at NASA, will they think of ways to build public housing projects for poor people in space? At what point does NASA become something more than a jobs welfare program for unemployed engineers?

Johnson supported Apollo and the Great Society. I ran across this quote about the Great Society:

We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

Imagine if we did the same today, to solve our problems. Then readjusted them once we found out what worked and what didn't. Read the whole speech [utexas.edu], we don't have any politicians today who are anywhere near as eloquent. We are the generation of incompetent politicians.

Actually, Johnson did not care about the space program itself... he cared about the prestige it provided him. As a senator from Texas, he saw the new agency Eisenhower created (NASA) as a new source or pork and prestige. As Kennedy's VP, he was assigned to oversee NASA and he used his muscle to get the astronauts and mission control into his state (hence the "Johnson Space Center"). The reality, however, was that for the long-term, Johnson saw the social spending as vital to future Democrat electoral domin

I wouldn't consider any "moon program" a must have for a single nation. Maybe for a world-wide international organization.While fighting the poverty, the illiteracy, the lack of food and water and so on, should be a must have, and a no.1 priority, for every single nation and for every international organization.IMHO.

This is the usual bullshit about how NASA advanced semiconductor and computer technology. About the only real advance to come from NASA was NASTRAN, the first finite-element analysis program. The paper talks about "space and defense". It was DoD, especially the USAF, that pushed semiconductor and computer technology hard. SAGE, the Atlas Missile Guidance Computer, the Navy's nuclear submarine program, and the various huge missile and radar programs of the 1950s and 1960s all advanced computer and electronics technology.

NASA was a consumer of those technologies, and in terms of units purchased, not a big one. NASA bought a few tens of rockets a year; at the peak, missile programs bought hundreds to thousands.

NASA was big on materials and weight reduction, and some interesting materials came out of NASA. But more of them came out of the USAF. At the time, much of that was classified. The SR-71 was a titanium aircraft flown in the 1960s. Lockheed's Skunk Works actually pioneered the use of liquid hydrogen as a propellant, although NASA took the credit. Heat shield materials came from missile nose cones.

NASA was #1 at public relations, and still has a huge PR operation. DoD and the USAF were trying to keep the USSR from finding out what we had. So NASA got to take the credit for a lot of stuff they didn't pioneer.

After all, Alan Shepard went into space atop a Redstone ICBM booster. John Glenn went into space atop an Atlas ICBM booster. The Gemini program used modified Titan II ICBM boosters. Only Apollo had its own booster.

In other words, NASA had some modest value as an early consumer of various state of the art technologies. My view is that this stuff would have been developed anyway and for less, without NASA involvement.

Without going and digging up all the proof, my understanding is that 2/3 of Shuttle missons were military in nature. Pretty consistent with what you are saying. The PR neither was nor is just for Russians me-thinks.:)

What I have found [thelivingmoon.com] is showing around 15 military missions, not nearly the 2/3 figure you're suggesting.

Now, if we're talking design features of the shuttle, those were heavily influenced by military requirements. The only way NASA could get enough funding to build the shuttle was to ask the military, which imposed significant performance requirements that drove up the weight and complexity of the shuttle. And, while useful, the additional capability was never fully used, nor was it ever used for its intend

The double-think which one has to perform to try to understand talk about job creators is mind-boggling to me. I can barely wrap my head around what mental gymnastics I'd have to do to buy into this nonsense. I look out my window and see birds flying around and eating food. They are free and need no one to "create jobs" for them, yet we humans seem to supposedly need heirs like the Koch brothers and others to create jobs for us. There was a poster in during the strikes and near-uprising in 1968 France (one fifth of France's population was on strike, de Gaulle fled the country) that said "Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui", but in this day and age of low VC investment, longer hours, boring work, high unemployment etc., people seem more enslaved to the heirs and their broken system then at any time - at least in the USA anyhow. In other countries they're trying to burn down US embassies as I type.

You used to be able to go to the federal government's BLS and see inflation-adjusted historical average hourly wages, but they removed that functionality, perhaps because it looked so bad. Here's a fellow who did it [blogspot.com] back in 2007, with links to the Federal Reserve and BLS data. As you can see, the hourly wage in the US was higher in the early 1970s then it is now. In fact, it was higher for the whole decade of 1968-1978 then it is now. All of this wonderful economic growth and job creation - what has it done for the majority of Americans over the past decades? Absolutely nothing. It all goes to the 1%, the majority of whom inherited it, if you're to believe the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Forbes 400 richest list etc.

Political scientists, historians, astronauts etc. are also pretty much in universal agreement that if communist parties had not come to power in Russia, China, eastern Europe etc. in the 1960s, that there is no way Congress would have ever financed the moon shot. Sputnik and the advancements in science and engineering in the Soviet Union are what loosened the purse strings in the US - the Soviets were winning the Space Race from Sputnik up until the end of 1968 where they were still winning the moon race. By that time the USSR was busy with Poland and Czechoslovakia and the like and Apollo 8 did its moon flyby, the first time the US really pulled ahead in the space race, which was followed by the next important US achievement, Apollo 11. It took the US over a decade to catch up and finally surpass the USSR. Then after a moon flyby and landing, that was pretty much the end of any major space spending. I don't see the point of The Atlantic talking about ancient history - it's not like if the US had any leftover money it would spend it on a project like that, not that it has any spare money.

The Illusion Of Prosperity graph and most such graphs don't take into account the fact that (perception of) prosperity is a moving target. We didn't have iPads or Galaxy S3s or electric cars or Twitter in the 70s. Comparing 70s living to today's isn't a fair comparison. Even more pointed comparison would be a king in the 1800s who certainly earned orders of magnitude more than even a poor person today - but still would have literally killed to have a fridge, car and a TV.

It is so very convenient, is it not, that consumer electronics are one of the relatively few categories of goods that are getting cheaper faster than you('you' in an average sense, individual 'you's may and do vary) are getting poorer. The real cost of food, housing, medical care, education, and petrochemicals may be rising relentlessly against wages(if you have a job, employment insecurity, permatemping, and other fun are all up too!); but you have a big TV so you must be

Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned that in a Science Friday episode that at the time the Apollo program was the biggest thing out there. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut - or at least work in the industry. It inspired a whole generation to be scientists and engineers - that might be even more valuable than the technologies that were directly developed by the program.

Nowdays there's no such thing in the US. Instead the space program is big in China [wikipedia.org] and a generation of science hungry kids is growing up there.

Poverty is an inevitability, not a social ill. What is social ill is the attempt to eradicate poverty at any cost -- since people's capabilities are vastly different, the stratification of a free society is inevitable, so 1) it takes a huge (and unnecessary) effort to bring the so called minimum standard of living to those that are incapable and/or lazy, and 2) the said effort decreases the overall freedom.

The Apollo program's critics said that the massive sums of money that were being spent on going to the moon could be better spent solving problems closer to home, and there's this perception that NASA somehow proved those critics wrong because they achieved something amazing (landing men on the moon). But what benefit has that really imparted to society? Hope? Pride? Entertainment? If that's all it was worth, that's what we have major league sports teams for. That is the argument you will get from critics.

To counter that argument, let's talk about what else society got from the Apollo program:

Integrated circuits [wikipedia.org] benefited from the development of the Apollo guidance computer. Without integrated circuits we wouldn't have personal computers, cell phones, DVD players, video games, GPS and a lot of other things.

Fuel cell [wikipedia.org] development got a boost from Apollo funding, but it may be harder to convince the general public of their usefulness because there aren't any commercially-available fuel cell cars on the market, but they're apparently widely used in forklifts at Coca Cola, Whole Foods, FedEx and others where they are cutting down on emissions.

What else owes its development to the Apollo program, and how does it benefit society? Please, add to this list so we can rebuff the people who say money spent on space is wasted.

Integrated circuits benefited from the development of the Apollo guidance computer. Without integrated circuits we wouldn't have personal computers, cell phones, DVD players, video games, GPS and a lot of other things.

The AGC design was based on the design of the Polaris A-2 guidance system, and originally used discrete circuits. But the time MIT decided to redesign the AGC using integrated circuits - the Polaris A3, with it's IC based guidance computer, was only a few months from it's first flight.

"In an age that worships technology, when man is lost among the instruments he has created, the space race erects new pyramids of gadgetry; in an age of materialism, it piles on more investments in things when what is needed is investment in people; in an age of extrovert activism, it lends glory to rocket-powered jumps, when critical self-examination and reflection ought to be stressed; in an age of international conflicts, which approach doomsday dimensions, it provides a new focus

Even if we accept the article's premise(that the 'great society' collection of programs was a failure), the best that that proves is that some contemporary critics of the Apollo program chose dubious grounds for criticism. As we have learned(and, incidentally, only by trying) social engineering is one of the trickier flavors of engineering.

Where TFA seems to go off the rails a bit is the jump from 'people who think we should have spent the money on 'great society' were wrong because great society failed' to 'Apollo program: Vindicated!'. If you want to assess the worth of a spaceflight R&D program, compare it to other possible spaceflight R&D programs(or to non-spaceflight R&D programs designed to produce interesting technologies: variations on the 'well, set the grad students loose to do basic research' are pretty cheap...)

As with any sufficiently large engineering project, there were some side effects. Somebody had to build the thing, and certain technological advances had to be made or perfected to get it working; but the same would be true of building a sufficiently large bridge to nowhere. If you actually want to vindicate a space program, you either have to admit that you are doing it because space is pretty cool, or seriously examine it against other possible technology programs, rather than digging up some overt failure to run against...

Seriously. The GP talks as if the money went into a black hole. It goes back into the economy, right away. The recipients are those who most urgently need money for basic necessities. They might even pay down some debt, which means the loan sharks, credit card companies, and other lowlifes who prey upon the poor won't be raking in quite so much money at 30% plus interest.

Well don't forget, right after Johnson began his Great Society programs, another program entered high gear that has systematically devastated poor communities in the US while doing nothing but losing ground on its stated goals: the War on Some Drugs.

Thank God it looks like we might finally be making some progress towards putting one of these deformed monstrosities down...

"technology has afforded that even the poorest of our poor (in the US) has cable televisions, cellular phones and a beater car to drive."

Must be nice to live in a bubble. The poorest of the poor in the US have no tv's, phones, or cars. The pain of their empty bellies, their untreated medical needs, and their anguish at hearing the cries of their starving children is ended when they freeze to death in a urine/vomit/and feces mixed puddle in some alleyway.

I howl and protest about India's space programme, but not because they should spend money else where, because they can't even build cars that don't catch fire. How can they be expected to build rockets that don't explode?

The Republican's voting base tends to be the better off, those not looking for handouts from the government and generally wanting less government, not more. They tend to understand that they actually have to pay for anything that the "government" gives them, and passing that money through several greedy hands in Washington before getting some of it back isn't very efficient.

Interesting question. Here is something Johnson said in his inaugural address:

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming-always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again--but always trying and always gaining.

Perhaps we're spending too much money causing poverty. If there are other aspects of society working against anti-poverty programs, removing that resistance will have a greater effect than adding more money or improving the efficiency on just the anti-poverty side.

Example: The War on Drugs. If it causes more harm than good, then taking money away from it will actually make anti-harm programs seem more effective, even though we don't actually improve the efficiency of anti-harm programs.

So Apollo, as relatively harmless Cold War cock waving, may have helped reduce poverty by taking money (on both sides) away from other, more destructive (poverty causing) forms of Cold War cock waving.